Synthesis and modification of fillers with derivatives of benzoic acids

The subject of this research work was an effect of liquid crystals on the properties of filled elastomer systems. Both commercially available and own synthesized liquid crystals were used. The elastomer was ethylene-propylene rubber, while precipitated silica and calcium carbonate were used as fillers. The liquid crystals were deposited on the surface of the fillers from solution. Their effect on the mechanical properties of the vulcanizates was studied.     

Hyers-Ulam stability of a general linear partial differential equation

Aequationes mathematicae - In this paper we will study Hyers-Ulam stability for a general linear partial differential equation of first order in a Banach space.     

Structure- and Data-Driven Protein Engineering of Transaminases for Improving Activity and Stereoselectivity

Amine transaminases (ATAs) are powerful biocatalysts for the stereoselective synthesis of chiral amines. Machine learning provides a promising approach for protein engineering, but activity prediction models for ATAs remain elusive due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality training data. Thus, we first created variants of the ATA from Ruegeria sp. (3FCR) with improved catalytic activity (up to 2000-fold) as well as reversed stereoselectivity by a structure-dependent rational design and collected a high-quality dataset in this process. Subsequently, we designed a modified one-hot code to describe steric and electronic effects of substrates and residues within ATAs. Finally, we built a gradient boosting regression tree predictor for catalytic activity and stereoselectivity, and applied this for the data-driven design of optimized variants which then showed improved activity (up to 3-fold compared to the best variants previously identified). We also demonstrated that the model can predict the catalytic activity for ATA variants of another origin by retraining with a small set of additional data.     

Adsorption of curatives and activity of silica toward elastomers

To characterize an activity of silica toward elastomers usually the parameters of the filler structure and a possibility of its interactions with macromolecules of a matrix are taken into consideration [1,2,3]. As a rule, low molecular weight substances of different polarity are dissolved in a rubber mix (e.g. accelerators, activators, crosslinking substances, etc). They undergo adsorption on the surface of active fillers what exerts an effect on a structure of a network formed and influences mechanical properties of vulcanizates at the same time.